Best Practices

Audience answers a simple, but powerful question:

“I have these products; who wants to buy them?”

Most segmentation tools let you group customers based on what they have already done — past purchases, browsing history, demographics — or based on who they are. That is useful, but it is backwards-looking.

Audience works differently. It segments based on what customers are going to do — identifying purchase intent before it happens, so you can market the right products to the right people at the right moment.

Instead of asking “who bought this before?”, Audience asks “who is likely to buy this next?” That shift is what makes it fundamentally different from traditional segmentation tools, and far more valuable for driving revenue.

With Audience, you can start segmenting based on what customers do rather than who they are, which is the most critical focus point in eCommerce.

Getting this right also protects the health of your email list. When people receive irrelevant emails, some unsubscribe — which is fine. The more dangerous outcome is when they do nothing.

They stay on your list, receive your emails, and never buy anything. Most email platforms charge per contact, so these silent non-buyers cost you money without returning any. This is what is known as a zombie list — subscribers who are alive on paper but dead to your business.

The data on segmentation is striking: segmented email campaigns generate 760% more revenue than non-segmented ones. Sending the right products to the right people at the right time is what keeps your list healthy, your costs justified, and your revenue growing.

This article outlines the best way to get started, inspiring you to do smarter marketing.

Purchase Intent #

Interested In is the most advanced and unique feature of Audience. It allows you to easily find potential buyers for your products.

All customers are equal — right? Although, as the saying goes, some are more equal than others. And it hurts your marketing when you treat them as if they are all the same.

Traditional demographic targeting assumes that specific types of people buy specific types of products. In practice, this means you miss a large portion of your real buyers.

A classic example: a store selling Marvel toys might target men aged 30–40 in a specific region. But demographics do not capture passion.

One real person who would be completely invisible to that targeting: a 35-year-old woman who hand-painted a board game into a Marvel-themed version and whose anniversary gift was the interactive Hasbro Infinity Gauntlet.

Huge Marvel fan. Zero chance of being reached by demographic targeting. And there are many more like her.

Behaviour-based segmentation solves this without needing any personal data. Clerk.io uses all order data from your webshop to predict what each customer is likely to buy next, based purely on what they and similar customers have done before.

Using this knowledge, you can create highly relevant marketing by promoting products to the customers who actually want to buy them.

Categories/Brands #

You likely have many different product categories and brands on your site for a reason. Consumers tend to favor specific types of products and brands that they have come to trust.

Most stores, however, send the same email to everyone. A sports store with customers who run, customers who cycle, and customers who do yoga is sending a newsletter about running shoes to people who own three bikes and have never bought a pair of trainers in their life.

It lands in the inbox, gets ignored, and eventually the recipient unsubscribes. Segmented campaigns get 39% higher open rates than non-segmented ones — a gap that only compounds the more irrelevant the content is.

Splitting your list by category and brand interest fixes this immediately. The runner gets running shoes. The cyclist gets cycling gear. The yoga customer gets mats and blocks. Each email is shorter, more targeted, and far more likely to convert — because every product in it is something the recipient actually wants.

The same logic applies to brands. A customer who consistently buys Nike is not necessarily interested in Adidas, and vice versa. Sending them emails about the brand they already trust increases the chance they click and buy. Sending them a mixed bag of everything reduces the signal-to-noise ratio until the email stops feeling relevant at all.

Marketing setup #

Choose 5-10 of your best unique categories and brands, such as Shirts, Sneakers, Pants, Sweatshirts, Socks, Nike, Adidas, Under Armour, Vettex, and Hummel.

Create individual Audiences with Interested In, using the keywords for these product types. You now have access to several segments of customers who are very likely to buy these products.

Sync each Audience to your email platform, and send emails that show products from these categories and brands. Because you know which items will be shown in each, you can tailor your subject lines to clearly mention them.

You now have a very effective email marketing strategy for reaching out with products that are actually interesting to each customer.

If you have Clerk.io’s Email product, you can also set up Recurring emails using our Recommendations Based on Keywords logic, by simply writing the name of the category or brand. This allows you to send highly relevant emails regularly to all of the Audiences you create.

You should also sync these Audiences to your Google Ads account. With them, you can target Audiences with products from each category, which highly increases the chances of them clicking and going to your site.

Longtail Products #

Many webshops tend to only market the “safe” products that most customers are likely to buy. However, this means missing out on a lot of sales potential, as you almost certainly have customers who want to buy the more special longtail products.

For example, jewellery stores mostly sell necklaces, rings, and earrings — which means they likely won’t send marketing material around their Star Wars Swarovski crystal figurines, for fear of putting off the majority of their list. But that approach leaves a significant amount of money on the table.

In one real example, a jewellery store had over 21,000 customers who were likely to buy exactly those figurines — identified not because they had bought them before, but because their purchase history showed interest in niche collectibles: a Toy Story figurine here, a Disney character there, anything suggesting they lean toward more unusual items rather than traditional jewellery.

Without Interested In, this audience would never be reached. With it, the store can send targeted emails to exactly those 21,000 people — without alienating anyone else on the list.

Using Interested In, you can find all customers who want to buy these longtail products, which significantly increases your email revenue potential.

Marketing setup #

Identify 5-10 longtail products or categories that you otherwise would not market, and create Audiences with Interested In for these. Then send emails showing those, just like with the categories and brands.

If you have Clerk.io’s Email product, you can also set up Recurring emails using Recommendations Based on Keywords just like your category and brand-based emails.

Further, sync the Audience to Facebook and Google, then create product campaigns around them to get more potential customers to see them.

Cross Selling #

Customers often place orders without buying that one great accessory that you know they will need. Maybe they purchased a brand new tent but forgot the crucial mosquito repellent that will make the trip actually enjoyable.

They will remember it eventually — ideally before the first night, and ideally from you rather than a petrol station at double the price.

Or consider a customer who bought a DSLR camera but no memory card or camera bag — two products they will almost certainly need within days of the purchase arriving. An email landing a week after delivery, showing exactly those accessories, is not intrusive. It is genuinely useful.

The timing is what makes cross-sell emails so effective. The customer is already in the mindset of that purchase. They just bought the tent — they are thinking about camping. They just bought the camera — they are excited about using it.

An email arriving in that window, showing the things that naturally go with what they bought, lands at exactly the right moment. A week later, when they have moved on to thinking about something else entirely, the same email is just noise.

Marketing setup #

Combine the features Have Purchased with Have Not Purchased to create an Audience of customers you can very likely cross-sell to using your industry expertise.

Maybe you want to find customers who have purchased a bike but not a lock, or a new guitar but not a gig bag.

Use this Audience in your email marketing and ads to show the accessories they absolutely need to buy.

Customer Data #

Segment your audience using customer attributes imported from your database. Any data point you store on a customer — subscription status, loyalty tier, dietary preferences, pet type — can be used to create sharper segments.

subscribed: true/false — Filter your entire customer base into those you can reach by email and those you cannot. Customers who are subscribed should receive your email campaigns. Customers who are not subscribed should be exported to your ad platforms instead.

This one split immediately improves both channels. Your email list only contains people who actually want to hear from you, and your ad budget is only spent on people you cannot reach for free.

You stop wasting money showing ads to customers who are already on your email list, and you make sure no customer falls through the gap entirely.

loyalty_tier — A store with a Gold, Silver, and Bronze membership programme can treat each tier differently. Gold members might receive early access to sales 48 hours before anyone else — a benefit that costs nothing to deliver but feels genuinely exclusive. Silver members get the same sale on launch day. Bronze members get it with the general public. Each group receives an email tailored to their tier, and the Gold members feel valued rather than lumped in with everyone else.

dietary_preference — A food or supplement store where customers have indicated they follow a vegan or plant-based diet can filter all campaigns through that attribute. Instead of sending an email about whey protein and beef jerky to a customer who is strictly plant-based, they only see oat protein, supplements, and snacks that match how they actually eat.

One attribute, and an entire category of irrelevant sends disappears.

pet_type — A pet store with customers who own dogs, cats, and small animals can send completely different emails to each group. A cat owner receiving a newsletter about dog training treats is not going to buy — and if it happens enough times, they will stop opening emails altogether.

Segmenting by pet_type means every product in every email is actually relevant to the animal sitting at home waiting to be spoiled.

Behaviour #

Behaviour segments by purchase frequency to let you market to customers based on how often they buy, and how their behaviour changes over time.

Importance #

Audience segments customers into Importance groups based on their orders:

• One Time Buyers
• Loyal Customers
• Frequent Buyers
• VIPs

One Time Buyers are simple, as they have purchased only once. The remaining groups change and develop over time as Clerk.io continuously predicts the orders and revenue to define each group.

One Time Buyers are important to reactivate. We often see up to 70% of a webshop’s customer base consisting of One Time Buyers — and the economics of reactivation are very different from acquisition.

A one-time buyer already knows your store, has already trusted you enough to complete a purchase, and requires far less convincing to come back. The only question is whether you give them a reason to.

In concrete terms, a one-time buyer might spend around €45 on their first order. A VIP, shaped by months or years of repeat purchases, might spend €590 per order — a difference of nearly 13 times.

Every one-time buyer you convert into a repeat customer is a step toward that number, and the effect compounds with every subsequent purchase.

Think about what this means at scale. If your store has 10,000 customers and 70% are one-time buyers, that is 7,000 people who already know you and have already bought from you once.

Running a single well-targeted reactivation campaign and converting just 10% of them to a second purchase means 700 additional orders. At an average order value of €50, that is €35,000 from a single campaign — without acquiring a single new customer.

And that is just the immediate revenue. Every one of those 700 people has now bought from you twice. Research consistently shows that a customer who has made two purchases is significantly more likely to make a third than someone who has made one. You are not just recovering a sale — you are resetting the trajectory of that customer’s relationship with your store.

Repeat customers also convert at a dramatically higher rate. Where a new visitor converts at around 2%, a repeat customer converts at 60–70% — more than 30 times higher. A 5% increase in customer retention can boost profits by 25–95%.

Acquiring new customers costs five to seven times more than retaining existing ones. Reactivating a one-time buyer is cheaper still, because they already know you. The one-time buyer segment is the single highest-leverage marketing opportunity most webshops have — and most of them ignore it entirely.

In your email platform, set up flows targeting One Time Buyers with personalized recommendations, news, posts, and any other incentives to keep them reminded of you.

VIPs are your most valuable customers and should be treated as such. They place the most orders and spend the most money with your business.

It is not uncommon for the VIP segment to generate up to 20% of total revenue on a webshop, despite representing a small fraction of the overall customer base.

A real example is a Danish concept store selling board games, LARP equipment, costumes, Warhammer, and more. The people shopping there have very different reasons for doing so.

Some love board games, others are deep into live-action roleplay and want weapons and clothing, others are cosplayers building elaborate costumes.

Each of these groups has its own VIP profile — what they spend, how often they buy, what they care about. Treating all of them as one undifferentiated “VIP group” means missing most of the value each one represents.

Marketing setup #

Create separate Audiences for One Time Buyers and VIPs.

In your email platform, send personalized emails at regular intervals, and if possible, include special offers, early access to products, and any other extras to make them feel special.

Your VIPs can also work as the foundation for finding new, similar customers who might not know about your webshop yet. Sync them to Facebook and use their Lookalike Audience feature to promote your ads to customers with similar interests to your VIPs.

Life Cycle #

Your customers are not equal, and neither are your recipients. Some are worth more to you than others, and some are more critical to reactivate than others.

That’s what Life Cycle is great for. It tracks where each customer is in their personal purchase pattern — and whether they are still following it.

Every customer has a rhythm. Some buy every few weeks. Others place an order every few months. Some only buy once a year at a specific time.

Life Cycle is built around that rhythm. It classifies customers as Active when they are shopping within their normal pattern, Slipping Away when they have gone quiet for longer than usual, and Lost when so much time has passed that they are unlikely to return on their own.

The key insight is that “slipping away” means something different for every customer. It is not a fixed number of days — it is a deviation from that specific customer’s behaviour.

A customer who shops every two weeks is slipping away after a month. A customer who shops twice a year is not slipping away at all — they are behaving completely normally, and targeting them with aggressive reactivation at that point creates friction rather than revenue.

This can be used to your advantage by setting up automated reactivation flows.

Marketing setup #

Create Audiences for Slipping Away and Lost. Then set up a flow in your email platform that sends an email to everyone currently in those audiences and continues to send to new customers as they enter them.

For Slipping Away customers, the email does not need to be dramatic. These are people who were active relatively recently and simply have not come back yet.

A personalised email showing products relevant to what they have bought before — maybe with a small incentive like free shipping or a 10% discount — is often enough. They have not gone far. They just need a nudge.

A sports store might send a Slipping Away customer who bought running gear a few months ago an email showing new arrivals in their size range alongside a code for free delivery on their next order. That customer was probably already thinking about new trainers. The email just made it easier to act.

Lost customers require a different approach. They have been gone long enough that a gentle nudge is unlikely to work — they need a reason to remember why they liked your store in the first place.

This is where a more compelling offer makes sense: a meaningful discount, a time-limited deal, a free product with their next order. Use whatever golden carrot you can provide — just stop short of going full Godfather and making them an offer they cannot refuse.

The same sports store might send Lost customers a “We miss you” email with 20% off their next order and a curated selection of products based on everything they have bought over their lifetime with the store. It is a bigger investment — but the customers it is targeting have a proven purchase history and real potential value if brought back.

In both cases, combine the incentive with personalised product recommendations using Clerk.io’s Recommendations Based on Orders logic, so the products shown feel relevant rather than generic. An offer on products the customer actually wants converts far better than a discount on something they have never shown interest in.

Combinations #

Audience lets you mix & match any of the features into very unique segments.

For example, you can create a special campaign for your VIPs who are Lost, or One Time Buyers who are interested in buying the new Nike sneaker you just got in stock.

Here are two more concrete combinations worth considering:

High-value reactivation: Customers tagged as VIPs + Slipping Away + Interested In a specific brand. This is a high-priority reactivation audience — people who have historically spent a lot and are showing early signs of drifting. A targeted email with a small exclusive offer can bring them back before they become Lost.

First purchase upsell: Customers tagged as One Time Buyers + Have Purchased a specific product category + Have Not Purchased a related accessory category. This combination finds customers who bought something and are statistically likely to need the companion product — but never came back for it.

Combining the different features makes your segments even more specific, which leads to more conversions when you show them what they want to see.

Use Everywhere #

Audience should be used with all the tools that you currently use for marketing based on email addresses. Think of it as your all-in-one segmentation partner that understands your customer base inside-out.

Email Platforms #

Sending your Audiences to your email platform is the best way to get started with smarter marketing. It’s the fastest, easiest, and likely cheapest method, as email marketing remains the most affordable way to keep customers engaged.

We recommend using Audience as the primary segmentation method when you send emails.

A marketer who used to send the same newsletter to 50,000 people — and wondered why open rates were low — can instead send twelve targeted emails to specific interest segments. Each email is shorter, sharper, and arrives in front of people who actually care about what is in it.

The result is more revenue, fewer unsubscribes, and less time spent second-guessing which products to feature.

Ad Platforms #

Increased focus on privacy makes it harder to segment in platforms like Google and Facebook. By using Audience in combination with these paid advertising platforms, you get a unique double AI advantage when advertising to customers:

• You get higher engagement from your ads because you know what to show to who.
• You can acquire more similar customers based on your existing ones.

Consider the difference between running Google ads to a “people who like fitness” demographic versus running ads targeted at the exact customers who bought protein powder three months ago but have not yet bought creatine.

One is a guess. The other is intent. The audience that already bought from you and is statistically likely to buy something specific next is vastly more valuable than any demographic category a platform can offer you.

The whole game with ad platforms is return on ad spend — how much revenue you generate for every euro you put in. Showing your ads to people who are already likely to buy dramatically increases that ratio, because you are spending your budget on the people most likely to convert rather than spreading it across a broad population hoping some of them care.

Clerk.io Email #

Using our Audience and Email tools together enables you to send emails with highly relevant product recommendations based on customers’ shopping experiences.

Recurring Newsletters are especially effective, as you can set up automated email campaigns that continues sending to the customers in each Audience.

Even if you want to still send emails with your existing email platform, you can use Clerk.io’s Embedded Recommendations to handle the products to show using logics like Recommendations Based on Orders or Keywords

This increases your email revenue and frees up time for you to focus on other, more creative marketing campaigns.

Sync Audiences #

Audience has integrations with many email- and ad platforms, and it’s highly recommended to set up synchronization as a first step. This way, you will always have up-to-date Audiences in your platforms, which you can use to reach the right people.

Go to Settings > Integrations and set up syncs with your email platform or ad platforms like Google Ads and Facebook.

Each integration has a specific guide showing you what to do. Afterward, you will be able to sync to the platforms in Export on each Audience page. This also removes a lot of potential headaches caused by manually copying and pasting email lists — which, let’s face it, probably drains your soul more than any other task in marketing.

Optimize Regularly #

The underlying AI in Audience runs continuously — it updates segments, tracks behaviour changes, and keeps your audiences accurate without any manual input. That part takes care of itself.

What needs regular human attention is the strategy built on top of it. Customer behaviour shifts over time. New product categories emerge. Some segments stop performing and others become more valuable.

A segment that generated strong returns six months ago might look very different today — not because the tool stopped working, but because your customers have changed.

Checking in regularly means asking the right questions: Are the categories I am marketing still the ones customers are most interested in? Are my reactivation campaigns converting, or do I need to adjust the offer?

Are there new segments I have not spotted yet that represent untapped revenue? Is my marketing actually moving the needle, or am I sending emails to the same people with diminishing returns?

The stores that get the most out of Audience are the ones that treat it as an active part of their marketing practice — not a background process they set up once and forget.

Clerk.io’s AI updates Audiences based on customer behavior at all times, but there will be cases where a human touch is needed to take your results to the next level.

Analytics #

This is your go-to place for an overview of your entire customer base. It lets you spot both positive and negative trends in your customers’ behavior, like the number of active customers you have today compared to last year, how many are slipping away, and more.

With this knowledge, you know whether things are going in the right direction, or if you need to plan reactivation campaigns and other marketing to keep your customers coming back.

As a rule of thumb, if you continuously get more Active customers compared to previous months, your marketing efforts are working.

Consider what it looks like when things are not going in the right direction. A store checks the Analytics dashboard after three months and notices that their Active customer count has been declining slowly — not dramatically, but consistently. Meanwhile, the Slipping Away segment has grown by 15%.

The store has been sending the same email campaigns to the same audiences every month without adjusting anything. The data does not tell them what to do, but it tells them clearly that something needs to change.

They look at which segments have grown the most and discover that a category they rarely market — outdoor cooking equipment — has quietly attracted a cluster of repeat buyers. They create a new audience around it, run a targeted campaign, and see the Slipping Away numbers stabilise over the following weeks.

Without the Analytics dashboard, that shift would have been invisible until it became a much bigger problem.

If you are unsure how to interpret what you see or where to focus next, Ask Clerk.io can help. Share what you are observing — more Slipping Away customers, fewer Active ones, a segment that is not converting — and Ask Clerk.io can suggest concrete changes to your email strategy to start moving the numbers in the right direction.

Segment Details #

Regularly check this dashboard to compare Audiences and find the ones with the most potential revenue.

This is especially useful for planning the advertisements that will generate the highest Return on Ad Spend.

To make this concrete: imagine you are choosing between two author-based audiences — one interested in Stephen King, one in Dean Koontz. Within a few minutes in Segment Details, you can see which has twice the potential revenue, which has the higher lifetime value, and which is worth running a campaign for right now.

You can also drill into the exact products most likely to appeal to each segment, which means you can create razor-sharp ads with very little extra effort. That decision, which might otherwise take days of spreadsheet work, takes minutes.

We recommend checking at least once a month and finding 3-5 Audiences with different category, product, or brand interests and focusing on those with the most potential revenue.

If your priority is getting a large but temporary boost in revenue, focus on those with the highest historic revenue, as these will often contain the most customers.

If your priority is long-term customer engagement, focus on the Audience with the highest lifetime value, as these will often have fewer customers who, in turn, spend more and buy more often.

If you are not sure which audiences to prioritise or how to compare them, Ask Clerk.io is a good sparring partner. Describe the audiences you have and what you are trying to achieve, and it can help you think through which ones have the highest potential and where to focus first.